Which software do you want for the GNU/Linux PowerPC Notebook?

Following our will of transparency reporting our activities, we do a fast review of the last month and what is coming next.

The first thing we want to say is that we recently requested your help through the forum to choose the core set of applications available on our Linux distribution. We proposed an initial list grouped by the type of application and now we have some new suggestions that we are considering. As you can imagine, in our listing appeared well known software like LibreOffice, Iceweasel (Firefox), Gimp, Transmission, Calibre … We invite you to visit the forum and give your suggestion in the dedicated thread.

Iceweasel browser

Regarding the initial funding, we recalculated the amount to raise, placing it at 55000 €. The increase is due to the expenses that we expect to certify the product. The objective is still to collect this sum before September 2016. So the crowdfunding will cover the design( that we will publish with an Open Hardware license ), the production of five prototypes and the certification process.

As we said some time ago, to get the crowdfunding phase launched we need to establish ourselves as an organization. The chosen form is a non-profit organization created in Italy. We are currently in the process of establishing the organization and we hope to close this issue later this month. Once established, we will notify and invite anyone who wishes to become a member. This will also help the project as it will provide funds for small expenses like hosting our website, presentation materials such as flyers, etc. More details will follow soon.

Alongside this month we will continue with the discussion on the hardware components to use. We have a list of possible components but we need to pick the right one in each case. Moreover, this kind of decisions depend on the format of the chassis. It is quite possible that this last requirement will be clarified very soon but we cannot guarantee anything yet. Once again we invite you to participate in the hardware forum to give us your opinion.

Finally, as someone asked in our forum, we want to inform you about our presence in social networks. You can find us on the following sites:

7 thoughts on “Which software do you want for the GNU/Linux PowerPC Notebook?”

Debian has recently decided that PowerPC will not be a release architecture for stretch due to lack of porters. I’m concerned about the negative this could have to this project. The other distributions I know of that officially support PowerPC are Lubuntu and Ubuntu-Mate (with Ubuntu as a community supported distro), but I am concerned these will be soon to follow if Debian no longer supports PPC. Are there any in the group with porting experience who may be able to work with Debian?

Hi Guillermo,
Unfortunately Altivec doesn’t function when running in little-endian mode on the Freescale/NXP e6500. I don’t think this is a good idea as it would carry a significant performance penalty for several popular applications (Blender, GIMP, and Krita have Altivec optimizations).
Fedora PPC64 may be a good choice.

I think this powerPC notebook project is cool. Unfortunately we could not close a deal on using our design of our super small form factor T4240ZMS design (see http://www.swissdutch.ch:6999/ ) as the base netlist for this project. In this case only a minor netlist change would be needed, and you get an almost validated design. We run Fedora 23 (BE) nicely on the NXP part. Supports Altivec. Cheers, Ronald

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